Salonen Was Born to Conduct Sibelius

Conducted with the authority of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Seventh Symphony carries the weight of a lifetime’s purpose.

PHOTOGRAPH BY HIROYUKI ITO / GETTY

Maybe I’m just getting older, but the music of Sibelius is starting to make me cry. No, not the fiery pieces, like the Violin Concerto (I know the thrill; I grew up on the Heifetz recording), or the plangent and pleading ones, like the Second Symphony, but the works about struggle and limits—like the Seventh Symphony (1924), his final essay in the form and one of the last pieces he completed before his puzzling thirty-year retirement. The opening of the work is little more than an upward-moving scale. But, conducted with the authority that Esa-Pekka Salonen brought to it last Tuesday night at Carnegie Hall, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the piece carried the weight of a lifetime’s purpose. By the time he composed it, Sibelius had learned to make the grandest statements with the most modest of materials, and, having reached perfection in a mere twenty-three minutes of symphonic score, he realized that his work was done. True, an Eighth Symphony was almost completed, but it was later destroyed; the Seventh’s final gesture, in which the first violins, with infinite patience, complete the scale by sliding from B to C—C major, the ur-key, the key of white notes on the piano—proved an impossible act to follow.

Salonen, beyond his considerable merits as a composer, was born to conduct Sibelius. He was not born to conduct Mahler, as his very clear but very cool collaboration with the estimable mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, in “Kindertotenlieder,” showed. But why shouldn’t Salonen pair Mahler with Sibelius? They were contemporaries, after all, working different sides of the street, one exploding the limits of symphonic form, the other boiling them down to the absolute essentials. Salonen brings translucent textures and a calming sense of order to the hot-blooded band that James Levine built; he’s an eminent modernist and doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. The finest recording of the Seventh, though, is probably Sir Thomas Beecham’s, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: it has a tinge of world-weariness and reflection, without any loss of vitality or vibrant coloring. It also has an aristocratic sense of ease—Beecham was expert at maintaining discipline while letting his players relax to do their best.

As it happens, the Violin Concerto (1903-05) was also on the program, with Christian Tetzlaff out front. Tetzlaff is, for my money, the finest violinist performing before the public today: he can invest a composition with a rich inner life while keeping the outward details of performance—intonation, power of projection, consistency of phrasing—completely invulnerable. I remember a performance of the piece with Joshua Bell, at Tanglewood some years ago, in which the concerto’s first two movements were treated more or less as a prelude for the rip-roaring finale. Tetzlaff, however, weighted the three movements evenly, making it an ideal companion for the Seventh Symphony that the older and wiser composer would eventually produce.